Free The Blue Touch Paper by David Hare

Inside the classroom, I was fine. In lessons, even with the more self-consciously eccentric teachers – teachers who loved playing up to the quirky characters long service had assigned them – there was a sort of order, a world I understood and in which I had always prospered. But outside the classroom, in the big farty dormitories of ranked beds and wanked-in handkerchiefs, I was lost. The other boys, a lot of them from Surrey, seemed to have a social ease, a basic understanding of how the world workedwhich I entirely lacked. The children of clergy who made up a third of the school’s intake may have lagged behind in material prosperity, but they all had a sense of belonging which I could only envy. They gave the impression, false of course, that they had arrived at the school knowing each other already.
    Within the first term, after a certain amount of half-arsed ridicule, I adjusted my accent. Tones which had been regarded as highfalutin in Bexhill were mocked as plebeian when aired at Lancing. My first few weeks were rough, as I struggled to smooth my own corners rather than to have them knocked off by others. I knew enough never to mention that my family lived in a semi-detached, but I also knew that the reasons for my disorientation were more than social. I didn’t know what attitude to take. Did I like this place or didn’t I? Harewood had been easy to deal with – a brutal and stupid school against which all self-respecting pupils rebelled. It was that simple. But Lancing was not simple.
    Halfway through my first term, I realised that I would be less unhappy if I had the right friends. My motive was not snobbery but understanding. I needed sympathetic companions who might help me get some insight into how this foreign culture – part Stanley Matthews, part Benjamin Britten – worked, and where I might fit in it. The problem was, I had no idea how to acquire friends, and failing made me unhappier still. I couldn’t get in with the right people, because, self-ignorant, I had no idea who the right people for me might be. This feeling persisted throughout my adolescence. In the 1980s, I would feel a strong identification with the work of John Hughes. Films like The Breakfast Club and Pretty in Pink , released for teen enjoyment, fascinated me because they detailed the agonies of social exclusion. The films were usually about girls, but my own dilemmasresonated closely enough with those of Molly Ringwald or Ally Sheedy. Everywhere at Lancing were enviable cliques of cheerful and self-confident young men, laddish in grey flannels and herringbone jackets, hands in pockets, ties casual at half-mast. I would see them lounging together, laughing in the school tuck shop, eating Flat Harrys and drinking Coke. They didn’t even bother to look up before dismissing the idea of my anguished and unconvincing company out of hand. My first friend, inevitably, was the lone Jewish boy, Peter Konig, because he too was contemplating Lancing in bewilderment. At least in Konig’s case there was a simple explanation – religious upbringing. In mine, what? Rank stupidity?
    My housemaster was Patrick Halsey, a humane and decent man. Then in his fifties, he had been a central pillar of the school’s hierarchy since before the war, when Lancing had been forced to migrate deep into the patrician country wildness of Shropshire to avoid the bombs. If Michael Phillips was the worst kind of Tory, Patrick was the best. A celibate bachelor, often come upon unexpectedly in corridors with a pipe in one hand and a glass of whisky and a copy of the Spectator in the other, he was married to his vocation. His quarters were immediately above his charges. He lived and slept school, leaving only occasionally between terms to visit his ageing mother in Berkhamsted. Religiously devout, he wore his love of teaching with an infectious light-heartedness which, we were told, dismayed his more pompous colleagues,